Is this anxiety in DD? Advice on how to help

[Californiadaze123]

My DD is 11 and is becoming quite extreme in her planning and timekeeping, it seems to be getting worse.
A few examples would be that when I switch her lights off at night, she’ll decide they should go off at 9.22 and if I go up 2 minutes early she will get extremely upset.
As soon as she gets up in a morning, she will run through her plan of the day with me, and is becoming increasingly less flexible if it changes, I have been trying to counteract it with telling her my plans for the day so we can try and fit them around each other, for example she’ll set certain for screen time, shower time, what time she’ll get into her pyjamas etc. All resulting in getting very upset if they can’t be done at her specific time.
if she wants her hair doing in a certain way, she will tell me the day before - over and over and also sending messages to ask if I can do it.
Being late also, if she’s late or doesn’t know what time she’ll be home from her Dads house she will voice note me apologizing and crying about it…I always try to reassure her that it’s fine.
Does this sound like anxiety and how do others cope with it? What do you do to try and make your dc less anxious surrounding this kind of thing? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated as it’s really starting to cause me and her a lot of stress.

@Breakfastatlunchtime that article was really interesting, thanks for sharing.

I actually think CAMHS are more dangerous than helpful.

Ive ended up paying due to their crapness

The thing is - there are OCD thoughts and there are OCD behaviours. When someone is having very severe intrusive thoughts that is really tricky - that is when they are distressing. I have gone through periods of having intrusive thoughts and I have found the only way to stop them was to accept that if you stopped the rituals your very worst fear might come true.

I think you might find it helpful to understand what your son thinks will happen if he doesn't perform his rituals. Literally say to him, if you don't do X - what do you think will happen? You might even find its his subconscious thought driving him and it might even help him to express this thought into words so he can challenge himself the validity of his internal rules.

When I was a child of around 5 or 6, if I heard an ambulance, I would have to say three hail marys and three our fathers...and if I didn't - in my head the consequence was the person in the ambulance would die...it drove me insane. . Eventually I did say to myself - they are going to have to die because I can't do this anymore....

I still have contamination but it used to be really bad - like I thought eating an icecube from the freezer that had been uncovered would kill me. For some reason when I was a child, someone once said to me the ice in freezers was poisonous....so in my first therapy session my 'homework' was to eat an uncovered icecube from the freezer and see how I felt!

I think as well - people with OCD who are messy often have ADHD or more significantly inattentive ADHD. Inattentive ADHD is a terrible word for this as it implies we are not paying attention....what we are really doing is thinking of a million things at once so we tend to over think things and this drives our anxiety and drives OCD. OCD is really just a coping mechanism for anxiety - the winning formula is to work out how to get the person to use a better copy mechanism.

The autism is neurodiversity - the OCD is mental health response to coping with that neurodiversity.

Hi OP , I hope you don’t mind me saying that I think this sounds like quite a stressful situation for a young teen to be in. She’s trying to navigate her dad not communicating with her mum properly and holding responsibility for that - and also she is really reliant on him in terms of timings etc. I wonder if she’s feeling out of control and so that she’s trying to get a sense of control where she can. And then maybe when her attempts to be in control fail, it taps into her general feeling and it feels like everything is falling down around her.
For sure, there may be other things to consider. If she is autistic, then this arrangement is likely to be really anxiety provoking too. I’m not sure of how much control you have in terms of this situation. Do you think her dad would communicate with you if he realised she was struggling as a result of the situation?

I think this might be causing a part of the problem.
I’ve tried emailing him this week, adding a voicenote of her crying in the bathroom at his house because he won’t tell her what time she’ll be coming home, he was just telling her that they’ll be back when they’re back. Again and very frustratingly I’ve not had a response. The only way I can see to get through to him about arranging contact through me instead of her, is to deny him any contact with her that they’ve arranged between themselves.

Which would obviously cause my DD a lot of upset while it gets sorted out, so I’d like to avoid this if possible.